Dinner tonight. Olives and a margarita for apéritif. Avocado with Worcester sauce for starter, with a cold beer. Then fillet steak au poivre, with fried potatoes, onions, and tomato, with red wine to drink. Followed by half a melon, then brandy. Sounds good as you read it here, but tends to be much the same each day since I'm no great shakes at cooking!

All the while running with perspiration, I have to keep switching my fan on. Only from time to time since I have to be careful with electricity, I'm running from batteries. Most of the stuff in the motor home runs from the motor home battery, leaving the van battery just to start the engine, but running the motor home battery too low too often damages it. I also have to be careful when driving it's so hot, I have to treat the engine gently to stop it boiling too much even though I use additives to raise the boiling point of the coolant, so generally I can't use the air conditioning, that makes the engine work harder! I just open all the windows and twist the quarter lights back to force a draught.

Having mentioned all that, I left the kids home early this morning. Some hours into the journey I noticed my purse had been ransacked. Not a lot of money, it was only coins, and I know it was not the kid who spent most of his spare time with me, it was one of his friends who dropped in from time to time. I gave him and a pal balloon tee shirts when I left before I knew anything had gone. I just hope second the recipient of the tee shirt was not the boy who took my cash!

However, the above is about all of interest that happened today. I didn't get to my intended parking for the night, it was too far to drive, although I did get to see the Pacific Ocean, first time this trip, and some magnificent views as I head north to Puerto Angel. I found a track that led to some salt flats and that's where I stayed for the night. 210 miles today, mostly not interesting scenery, that's about the total that I have driven in the past week.

I don't know why all these birds were here, there were lots more than you can see on the picture.

In the morning I noticed my waste water tank had partially dropped off it's mountings. It's probably been like that for weeks. I noticed a workshop with welding equipment around and stopped. The mechanic produced the biggest crow bar I have ever seen, about 5 feet long, and just bent the brackets back into place. Then welded some reinforcing angle iron to the supports so they won't bend again. He also spent some time straightening out my rear bumper which has been bent since I almost pulled the back off the van in New Orleans last November. He asked 100 pesos, I gave him 120.

The road up the coast is actually not very near the coast so I took a 7 km long very bumpy track to get a closer look then continued on to the Bahias de Huatulco area. This is planned to be a new resort complex but unlike Cancun the hotels etc are separated by stretches of unspoiled shoreline. I didn't quite get there though. I turned to look at the first stretch of beach at La Bocana and fell into conversation with a Canadian opening a bar here. He's been travelling in a bus for around 6 years, with his wife and up to 7 children, depending, (there were 5 girls with them here between about 7 and 14) and stopping to open bars or motels or restaurants in different places as well as acting as a tour guide. He's been all over the place. I gave the girls beads. These free Mardi Gras beads are producing a bit of fun for a lot of people!

Part of the beach at La Bocana, the river Copalita enters the sea here, just behind the chunks of rock and the water is warm warm warm!